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It is more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to know what sort of disease a person has. Hippocrates

A vital life force flows through our bodies via the arteries, veins, lymphatic system, nerves and chi (energy). Our bodies can self-regulate, self-heal and self-repair if there is unrestricted flow of these elements. When the obstacles to the free and dynamic flow are removed, hemodynamics (blood and fluid circulation) and homeostasis are achieved. Maya Abdominal Therapy, Chi Nei Tsang, and Visceral Manipulation can assist in both homeostasis and hemodynamics, enabling us to live the divine promise of a long and healthy life with fully functioning organs that digest, assimilate, eliminate and reproduce in a manner that is easy and uncomplicated.

Inspiration from Stephen Buhner: "A lot of people think they don't know where they belong. The universe created one place for you to live, and there it is. Your body is your best friend. If you learn how to be friends with your body and use its capacity for sensing you will have a great ally. Goethe says it makes a wonderful difference whether you find in your body an adversary or an ally. To learn the body's capacity to sense, to not mind being embodied, is really important."

Wisdom from Matthew Woods: "Instead of thinking of diseases as precise germ entities or molecular lesions observable in isolated tissue samples, we need to understand disease in terms of patterns of imbalance. This is not new knowledge. Plato described it perfectly twenty five centuries ago in a passage in the Timaeus (Longrigg, Greek Medicine, 1998, 160):

'Diseases, except where they are very dangerous, should not be irritated by drugs. For every disease has a structure that resembles in a certain manner the nature of living creatures. For the composition of these living creatures has prescribed periods of life for the species as a whole. . . . It is the same with the constitution of diseases; whenever anyone destroys this by drugs, contrary to the allotted period of time, many serious diseases are wont to arise from those that are few and slight. Consequently, so far as leisure permits, one should control all such diseases by regimen, instead of irritating a troublesome evil by administering drugs."

Advice from Ms. Manners:

Contracting a dreaded disease is not trouble enough, Miss Manners has noticed. The next bad news after the diagnosis is that the afflicted have also been drafted into the army.

"She's battling cancer," people will say.

"He's fighting cystic fibrosis."

"She lost her long battle against heart disease."

Never are they allowed to forget that they have become soldiers. No matter what they do, they are congratulated for being courageous. They are gallant. They never stop fighting.

Miss Manners is not sure why this pugnacious metaphor unsettles her. Surely it is better than the language of passive victim hood, and we have all been subjected to about as much of that as we can bear. In contrast to general piteousness of the population, wailing about the common difficulties of life, it is a relief to think that those who have life-threatening problems are taking charge and dealing with them aggressively.

That approach should also encourage others to treat seriously ill people more acceptably. From the apparently safe sidelines, one may be fearful for soldiers who are in danger, but it is an admiring sort of fear, in contrast to pity, which is so discouraging to bear.

That it is euphemistic to describe illness in military terms does not bother Miss manners in the least. On the contrary, she is euphemism's sole defender. If there is a protective way of saying something awful, you will not find her yearning to hear it put more painfully.

Still, there are things that disturb her about this particular comparison.

One thing is that it makes illness sound like a career. It becomes something that one does, rather than something that one happens to have. However much a person's condition of health affects his or her life, it is not likely to be the chief identity that person cares to have from then on.

Furthermore, this particular career is one that requires civilians to keep out of the way. Surely people are quite callous enough about deserting the ill without being encourage to think of them as too busy with maneuvers to notice.

Even more troublesome to Miss Manners is the suggestion that illness is a conflict that, however potentially lethal, can be won through strength of will and courage Although this has the laudable intention of encouraging a beneficial and often warranted optimism, the military metaphor says something more.

It says that disease is a test of a person's worth. We assume, in warfare, that the good will win - and if not the good, then the strong.

The intense interest people have taken in their health in recent decades has yielded enormous benefits in the way of encouraging healthful behavior, and Miss Manners considers it well worth the annoyances of listening to people discussing their food and exercise regimes.

But it has also encouraged belief in what a doctor of Miss Manners' acquaintance calls Punitive Medicine - the notion that getting sick is probably a sign of bad behavior, and not being able to conquer it a sign of weakness. The discussions one hears about what the ill and even the dead have done or not done to deserve their fate for not having "taken care" of themselves are viciously rude.

People who are sick should be allowed to retain their civilian status. They should not have to be heroes (in the old sense, Miss Manners means - before we redefined heroes from those who performed rescues to those who have the misfortune to be captured) if they don't feel up to it."

HEALING IS PURE GRACE

To heal, we don’t need to be intelligent

We don’t need to be good

We don’t need to deserve it

We do need honesty

We do need to be true to ourselves

We need to be able to admit that we have

Feelings we wish we didn’t have

We need to own these feelings so we can

Outgrow them, and mature as human beings

Gilles Marin

“If we are creating ourselves all the time, then it is never too late to begin creating the bodies we want instead of the ones we mistakenly assume we are stuck with.”

–Deepak Chopra

Resistance: During the 1840's, Dr. Semmelweis, an obstetrician in Vienna, Austria in 1818,noted that up to 30 percent of the women giving birth in the hospital where he worked were dying of a bacterial infection. By contrast, women who were giving birth at home with the help of midwives, were not succumbing to this deadly bacterial infection.

He discovered that medical students were coming straight from the autopsy room to the delivery room and spreading the infection to the mothers.

He recommended that all doctors wash their hands before delivering babies. It seems like such a no-brainer today, but this suggestion was met with strong resistance at the time.

When he ordered those working with him to wash their hands before the delivery process, the death rate shrank to about 1 percent. But hospital officials still resisted adopting the hand-washing policy, and eventually, Semmelweis left the hospital. He began to write inflammatory open letters to the obstetric community about the importance of hand-washing, but he was often ridiculed and his findings were largely rejected by his colleagues. He even stood outside of the hospital and cried, "Wash your hands" to the doctors who were going to work.

It wasn't until many years after his death in 1865 that the concept of hand-washing as a way to avoid transferring infectious diseases became commonplace.